The Middlebury Spectator / Fratfalls
Hume, Sandy
A college buddy of mine called a few weeks ago to deliver the news that Delta Upsilon, our old fraternity at Vermont's Middlebury College, has been placed on "indefinite probation" after a...
...As the jock house on campus, DU (which detractors say stands for "Dumb and Ugly") made an inviting target...
...Technically, this means that our house will be converted into a dorm for general use and the rushing of new members will cease...
...only Delta Kappa Epsilon owned its own house, and it launched a court battle that continues to this day...
...And then came the hazing issue...
...I asked a brother about the absence of nearly every spoke in the three-story stairway banister, and he smiled: "We call it the monorail...
...The decision went to the trustees, who in January 1990 ordered the fraternities to accept women...
...If DU's experience is any indication, opening up these institutions may shut them down...
...The administration disagreed...
...A college buddy of mine called a few weeks ago to deliver the news that Delta Upsilon, our old fraternity at Vermont's Middlebury College, has been placed on "indefinite probation" after a three-year experience with admitting female members...
...And fraternity brothers benefitedfrom "networks" that gave them an advantage after graduation...
...Fraternity members protested, arguing that abolition violated their right to freedom of association...
...Female members were inevitable...
...Middlebury had in place a liberal "open rush" policy that prohibited issuing bids—anyone who wanted to join a house had to be admitted...
...In the last few years coeducation mandates have been delivered to fraternities at Trinity College in Connecticut and Bowdoin College in Maine, and—after a faculty report labeled them sexist, racist, and homophobic—Tufts University in Massachusetts is next...
...Ivy League dining clubs and Yale's secret societies have either already admitted women or are in the process of doing so...
...She has since recovered enough to file a $1.5 million suit against the county school system for not adequately informing her of the risks of the game...
...In her first scrimmage she was tackled and ended up on a life-support system for four months...
...Then, last year, word reached the deans that female pledges had joined in the traditional dogfood dinner, and an investigation ensued...
...Hazing at DU had never been of the now largely extinct drink-this-grain-alcoholuntil-you're-comatose variety (indeed, our pledges were forbidden to drink alcohol...
...Without such bids, the house could not limit the number of male pledges and meetthe prescribed quota...
...Thus, DU found itself in trouble the first year...
...Delta Upsilon will likely never recover...
...The Catch-22 of the nobid/quota system and the very nature of the fraternity itself triggered its demise...
...In the on-campus debate that raged for months, critics assailed them as bastions of sexism that afforded men opportunities not available to women—fraternities threw parties in the prime social spaces on campus and lived in large, attractive (from the outside) houses...
...In 1989 Tawana Hammond tried out as a running back for the Francis Scott Key varsity football team in Union Bridge, Maryland...
...This is, in fact, what many faculty members and administrators wanted...
...But to say that excluding someone violates his constitutional rights is to miss the essence of the right to freedom of association—as DU argued, to no avail...
...One fraternity moved off-campus, but the administration outlawed that move, and announced that anyone participating in an "underground" fraternity would face suspension...
...DU responded with a keg party/protest/riot, which left the house looking like Hurricane Andrew had stopped in for a beer...
...At the annual spring toga party in 1988, brothers hung out the window a mannequin adorned with a sexually suggestive name...
...all along...
...That the college owned DU's house allowed it freedom to impose its will...
...The faculty, by an overwhelming majority, voted to do just that...
...As Dean of Students Ann Hanson put it, "Part of your freedom to associate as an all-male group deprives me of my freedom to associate as part of your group...
...Sororities died out on campus in the 1970s, and in the current climate it would be unthinkable to settle for their restoration...
...The administration put DU on probation for a year and took away the house...
...We lacked the money to fight, and our first female pledges—six in all—were admitted the next fall...
...Enraged feminists demanded that DU and five other fraternities be abolished...
...As the termination order awaits the final judgment of President McCardell, a Maryland court is handling a case of a young girl who wanted to join a formerly all-male enclave and found she did not like the consequences once she did...
...Initially, one girl contacted the deans to complain that her roommate, a DU pledge, had been forced to do laundry for brothers, as well as leave in the middle of the night for pledge meetings...
...Seeing abolition as too severe, the trustees sought to extend fraternity life to women while softening its rougher edges...
...As it stands, the faculty and others who supported abolition have won this round...
...At the time of the trustees' decision, we in DU were taking regular "gender-awareness" classes, learning, as Dean Hanson put it, to talk "about persons instead of bimbos...
...T he monorail party has brought further possible sanctions—a termination order has been put before president John McCardell for final ruling...
...F raternities appeared doomed...
...Now under the control of a committee, we were instructed to meet "guidelines" for the first year of coeducation that required at least one-third of the pledge class be female...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
